Below is another guest post from “James Fearon”:http://www.stanford.edu/~jfearon/. Jim wrote this two weeks ago in response to a question from an editor at “Politico”:http://www.politico.com/, where it was also just “posted”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/52742.html. Politico agreed to have it cross-posted here as it may be of interest to many of our readers.
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Does what’s going on in Libya qualify as a civil war? Or is it a “clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition”? Many analysts, including Thomas Friedman and David Kirkpatrick, have suggested that U.S. response pivots on the answer to this question.
If it’s a civil war, the argument goes, then support for the rebels may force us to choose between “mission creep” into another costly military entanglement; and abandoning them, which could make a mockery of the intervention’s initial humanitarian goals.
If it’s a clash between an unpopular dictator and an opposition force, then intervention to prevent Col. Muammar Qadhafi from crushing the rebellion is more likely to produce a political transition to something better than a costly stalemate.
But this “Is it a civil war?” frame is misleading in two ways. First, it can be a violent clash between a brutal dictator and opposition forces and still be a civil war, the way the term is commonly used. In fact, what is happening in Libya is appropriately described as a civil war.
Below is another guest post from “James Fearon”:http://www.stanford.edu/~jfearon/. Jim wrote this two weeks ago in response to a question from an editor at “Politico”:http://www.politico.com/, where it was also just “posted”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/52742.html. Politico agreed to have it cross-posted here as it may be of interest to many of our readers.
***
Does what’s going on in Libya qualify as a civil war? Or is it a “clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition”? Many analysts, including Thomas Friedman and David Kirkpatrick, have suggested that U.S. response pivots on the answer to this question.
If it’s a civil war, the argument goes, then support for the rebels may force us to choose between “mission creep” into another costly military entanglement; and abandoning them, which could make a mockery of the intervention’s initial humanitarian goals.
If it’s a clash between an unpopular dictator and an opposition force, then intervention to prevent Col. Muammar Qadhafi from crushing the rebellion is more likely to produce a political transition to something better than a costly stalemate.
But this “Is it a civil war?” frame is misleading in two ways. First, it can be a violent clash between a brutal dictator and opposition forces and still be a civil war, the way the term is commonly used. In fact, what is happening in Libya is appropriately described as a civil war.
A civil war is a violent conflict within a country between organized groups, who aim to take power at the center or in a region. It must be large enough in terms of destruction and numbers killed on both sides.
How large is enough is not written in stone anywhere. But if, as seems likely, at least 1,000 have been killed in total, and if the rebels have killed at least 100 on the government side, then the Libya conflict would already rank as a civil war for many of the political scientists and sociologists who study such events.
But so what? The second way the “Is it a civil war?” frame can mislead is that the most important questions are about whether the regime will fall. And, if it does, will major “mission creep” be in the cards.
Will the Qadhafi regime collapse under the pressure of the international response in its current, no-fly-zone form? No one knows — even people with actual Libya expertise.
It looks like the regime now consists primarily of militias under the direction of different Qadhafi family members. Wholesale, high-level defections by those controlling the militias would seem unlikely. But we don’t know about the rank-and-file, or whether military pressure from the air or defections by prominent tribal leaders would lead troops to “tip” into wholesale desertion.
It is encouraging that, even in Tripoli, foreign journalists see many signs that people loath the Qadhafi regime and would like it gone. It is, of course, discouraging that the rebels are so disorganized and, to date, militarily ineffective.
What would happen if the regime does collapse? Here, the odds of a coherent and minimally capable new government forming are far lower than for Tunisia or Egypt.
Libya’s history — but even more Qadhafi’s method of rule — seems to have produced an atomized population with no national organizations. Indeed, hardly any organizations at all.
Tunisia and Egypt have professional militaries, capable of backstopping order while trying to work out a political transition. Not so in Libya. Anarchy is a major risk, which could result in humanitarian disasters worse than anything expected in Benghazi if Qadhafi resumes control there.
This is the recurrent dilemma of armed humanitarian intervention – you go in to save lives, then find that you can’t leave without risking even more.
It should not surprise anyone at this point. Humanitarian interventions are most likely in extremely weak states, where the governments are not far from anarchy to begin with.
Back in 2001, when I was working with my co-author David Laitin on an International Security article, “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States”:http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/512/neotrusteeship_and_the_problem_of_weak_states.html, we interviewed U.N. officials about the organization’s new peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
We asked, in so many words, Aren’t you worried that you’re just going down the road to ‘mission creep’ again, despite recent UN reports warning against this? Setting mission goals that aren’t attainable given the resources the Security Council and members states are actually willing to provide? Imagining that you can pull out if there are massacres and the “will” for peace among the combatants turns out to be just rhetoric?
We were told, in so many words, “No, we’ve been very careful this time. The mandate has been carefully drawn, and we won’t be pulled down the path that led to major expansion of the missions that we saw in Somalia, Bosnia and Sierra Leone.”
But a much expanded U.N. force is still in the Congo, several rounds of massacres later.
This is not to say that the mission’s humanitarian benefits have not been worth the costs. Only that the forces for mission creep — or mission gallop — can be extremely strong when you intervene in a state near anarchy. Or where you help to introduce it — as we did in Iraq.
As for Libya, Western, Arab and U.N. diplomats should be thinking about how to configure a post-conflict international mission to support and help develop a post-Qadhafi regime.
It may not come to that — perhaps an East-West stalemate will develop, or Qadhafi forces regain effective control despite air attacks.
But if it does, the forces pressing for something that is de facto “transitional administration” – the U.N.’s term for temporary shared domestic and international control of key government functions – are likely to be strong. Who would organize the elections and help police the competition they would entail?
It’s hard to walk away from anarchy. It’s been done, in Somalia, but the interests pushing for engagement in Libya are stronger.